Championing a healthy society

Engaging and strengthening communities

Our stores and our business are very much part of local communities across the UK; something we are conscious – not to mention proud – of. For us, being part of a community means play a part. As well as ensuring our customers benefit from the quality and value of our products we want to make a positive change to people’s lives in doing so.

For us, this starts with building strong partnerships with those organisations that are close to both our customers and us. We are sponsoring and shaping a national programme led by charity Keep Britain Tidy to support the next generation tackle a range of environmental issues, and have recently partnered with Neighbourly as part of our committment to reducing food waste.

While supporting charities is an important part of our community involvement, our responsibility extends wider: we want to help tackle issues close to our customers such as health, nutrition, obesity and food poverty. One way in which we are addressing these challenges is our recent sponsorship of the English, Scottish and Welsh FA Skills programmes, an initiative that gives 5-11 year olds of all abilities the opportunity to get active, learn new football skills and enjoy the game; something we are extremely proud to support.

We’re making a Pledge for More Veg

We all know that veg is good for us, but we don’t eat enough of it. According to a study done by the Food Foundation, everyone in the UK needs to be eating at least one extra portion of veg a day to help live better, healthier lives.

However, we recognise that in our busy day-to-day lives it can be difficult to increase the amount of veg we eat for a range of reasons. That’s why we’re pledging to play our part to help everyone in Britain to eat an extra portion of veg a day.

In order to make sure we achieve this, we have committed to the following targets:

As a minimum we will advertise veg monthly through our owned print and digital channels. Additionally, we will endeavour to advertise veg through our external print advertising channels.

We will continue to advertise veg through ‘Pick of the Week’on the LIDL UK website landing page.

Going forward we will ensure that all main-course recipes include at least 2 varieties of veg. As part of our FA skills partnership, all recipes given to participants will contain at least 2 portions of veg and we will take this opportunity to showcase healthy eating to participants

At least once a month we will post an appealing mention of veg on social media. We will aim to grow this over time

We will reposition veg (alongside Fruit) to the front of the store as part of our new store rollout.

We will aim for half of our monthly pick of the week promotions to be veg (which equates to six or more veg lines promoted per month).

After the success of introducing vegetables into the fun size range we will expand the offering of veg as part of this category, making veg attractive and appealing to children.

We will continue our close working relationship with our suppliers to bring new and innovative vegetables to the market.

We will ensure that all pre-prepared ready meals contain either an 80g portion of veg or an equivalent serving suggestion on pack.

Healthy checkouts

January 2014 saw the national roll-out of our Healthy Checkouts initiative, in which sweets and chocolate were removed from all checkouts in Lidl stores. These were replaced with more nutritious options such as dried fruits and nuts, seeds, fresh fruit and fruit juices. Since our roll-out this approach has been mirrored by many other supermarkets in the UK.

This initiative followed our own research that showed that 68% of parents are pestered by their children for chocolates and sweets at the checkout – one in six (16%) state this occurs every time they shop.

More than half of parents claim their best efforts to feed their children healthily are hampered by being surrounded by chocolates, sweets and other unhealthy snacks and our figures found that 52% of parents find it hard to get their children to eat healthily when there are snacks everywhere – particularly at supermarket checkouts.

This was the first initiative of its kind by a UK supermarket and has been lauded by our customers, peers and the Government.

Jane Ellison, Public Health Minister, said: ‘I strongly welcome the introduction of healthy checkouts by Lidl, which is being rolled out as a direct result of customer research and feedback which has shown that a majority of parents are supportive of supermarkets offering healthier alternatives at checkouts.’